A friend in the White House called last week to let me know that Tony Dolan, who had been working with him on President Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, passed away that morning.
His name may be unfamiliar, but you know his words: Tony “Evil Empire” Dolan was President Ronald Reagan’s chief speechwriter.
It was a title he held throughout all eight years of the Reagan administration, though leadership of the speechwriting team transitioned back and forth between him and the equally stalwart Ben Elliott, depending on which one had most pissed off the functionaries in the West Wing at the time.
Probably nothing angered those functionaries more than the speech Tony wrote for Reagan’s appearance in early 1983 at the National Association of Evangelicals.
Its invocations of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, its warning that faith and morality are the foundation of a free society, and its forthright identification of the Soviet Union as the “locus of evil in the modern world” — more pithily, an “Evil Empire” — pushed every West Wing button.
As it happens, my first encounter with the speech was when I opened up The New York Times the next day while riding on Amtrak from New York to Washington to meet with Tony for what became, in the course of our lunch, a job interview.
I was stunned as I read the speech — in the same way it is stunning today to hear President Trump speak obvious truths whose public utterance has been all but banned by our social arbiters.
I was still somewhat dazed as I sat down with Tony in the White House Mess. I mentioned the speech and how extraordinary I’d found it.
“Oh, yeah,” said Tony, and proceeded to tell me the backstory.
White House staffers, who believed their role was to protect Reagan from his more “conservative instincts,” excised the Evil Empire epithet from Tony’s draft, along with much of the other language they deemed “inflammatory.”
But Tony, whose bureaucratic skills would have stood him in good stead in the Byzantine Court, got his original draft to the president. Reagan loved it, particularly the Evil Empire part.
So history was made.
It was a process, I would soon learn, that played out almost daily in the Reagan White House.
Indeed, there is little Reagan said of historic consequence that the staff and other “wiser” heads in the administration — Secretary of State George Schultz and Chief of Staff Jim Baker first among them — didn’t try to block, water down and turn into rhetorical mush.
That included Tony’s earlier reference, in a speech to British parliament, predicting the Soviet Union would end up on the “ash heap of history,” and Peter Robinson’s famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
We didn’t suffer the outright criminality and, some would say, treason that characterized the “resistance” in Trump’s first administration, but we fought daily against the same uniparty thinking.
There was barely any conservative media back then; National Review and the American Spectator, and on some issues The Wall Street Journal editorial page, were about it.
In fact, the conservative movement hadn’t grown much in the decades since Bill Buckley quipped that it could hold its national convention in a phone booth.
As a result, the number of actual Reaganites in the Reagan administration numbered a mere handful, with the largest concentration of true believers clustered in the speechwriting department.
That was fortunate: The formulation of speeches was the ground on which many of the administration’s most intense policy battles were fought. But it meant that every day was a kind of guerilla warfare.
It likely would have been a losing proposition without a leader possessing Tony’s particular set of skills.
Before joining Reagan’s presidential campaign, Tony had already made a name for himself as a reporter, winning the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles that brought down the Mob in Connecticut.
That experience made him impervious to intimidation, and it gave him a keen ability to sniff out lies and deceptions — whether crafted by the Soviet propaganda machine or the hive mentality of Washington.
It also endowed him with a profound respect for the power of truth.
Because of that, Tony scored victory after victory for America and for the cause of freedom. He will be sorely missed.
Joshua Gilder was a speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush (1983-84) and President Ronald Reagan (1985-88).
This story originally appeared on NYPost
